


There's someone else I've got to be

by S_Horne



Series: A May Medley [16]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s homophobia, Coming Out, Discussion of Homophobic Violence, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Steve is brave, Tony is Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 12:59:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18851563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/S_Horne/pseuds/S_Horne
Summary: Steve swallowed and began to turn the cards over in his hands, running his fingers along the edges of the paper as he got lost in the memories.“All he did was fall in love and he lost his life. The wrong people found out about him and his partner and that was it. They never got to grow old together. Never got to do anything together. I grew up being told that it was wrong, that being gay was bad. I can’t tell you the number of times that I was told I was going to hell if I so looked at another man. It was everywhere. For a society that condemned being gay, they sure talked about it a fucking lot. I was told it over and over again, told to hide away and pretend that I wasn’t broken.”ORNational Honor LGBT Elders Day





	There's someone else I've got to be

**Author's Note:**

> Please take heed of the warnings - the violence is all in the past, but it's there and it was bad
> 
> Day Sixteen: _National Honor LGBT Elders Day_

Steve held Tony’s hand in an almost bruising grip. His arms were shaking slightly and he felt dangerously close to passing out. It was a weird feeling, one that he wasn’t used to having swirling around inside of him. Steve was used to being strong and always being the one in control. It was a strange chance of pace to be the one with trembling knees and beads of sweat dripping down his neck.

“Hey,” Tony said, tugging on Steve’s arm to get his attention. Steve turned to him with a questioning expression, gaze a little hazy. “You can do this.”

“I don’t think I can,” Steve whispered, eyes wide and lips horribly dry. His stomach was churning and he could almost taste his heartbeat.

“You can,” Tony promised, a beautifully sincere smile soft on his face. “I know you can. But you don’t have to. You don’t need to do this if you don’t want to, sweetheart. I mean it; nobody is forcing you. It’s okay.”

Steve took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he let his shoulders fall down, shaking himself in an attempt to relax as he set his face into that fierce flash of determination that pretty much personified Captain America.

“I can do this,” Steve said. His tone came out surprisingly confidently and, for a fleeting moment, he really believed himself.

Tony didn’t reply verbally, just squeezed Steve’s hand and smiled at him. With no more time to delay, Steve let Tony’s hand fall and stepped away. Taking another deep breath, Steve turned on his heel and took the final few paces out of the back room and into the main hall. As he walked across the stage, he kept his eyes down in a futile attempt to block out the noise from the overwhelming number of reporters and the bright flashes of a sea of cameras.

All too soon he was standing centre-stage and he blew out a shaky breath, bracing both hands on the podium as he stared out at the faces waiting with anticipation.

“Good afternoon,” he said, voice embarrassingly hoarse. He cut himself off and swallowed thickly, harshly. The words on the note cards in front of him began to swim, blurring into thick black lines that weren’t legible and only made him panic more. The longer he stood there without speaking, the more nervous he started to get. With each passing moment he could feel his heart pounding rapidly, the sound of its beating so loud that he was almost convinced it could be heard echoing around the room.

It was a nightmare. The whole thing was literally a living nightmare for Steve and he was heading down into a spiral. He couldn’t do this; the thoughts swirling in his head were threatening to consume him and bile rose in his throat. He couldn’t. He just wasn’t strong enough.

He turned away and was about to leave when he caught sight of Tony. His beautiful, brave Tony who wasn’t doing anything but standing at the back of the room with a soft smile. He wasn’t doing anything special, but he didn’t need to. Tony was all that Steve needed. When he was at his lowest points and when the ice was doing its best to consume him all over again, it was Tony that got him through. Tony with his joking tone or a cheeky wink, Tony with his cocky smirk and his strong hands. It was for Tony that Steve would do anything.

 

 

“When I was a young boy,” Steve said suddenly, his eyes boring into Tony’s and completely ignoring the notecards that they’d all worked so hard on, “it was illegal to be gay. It was illegal, both morally in the eyes of society and lawfully wrong, to love who you fell for regardless of their gender. I mean, we knew gay men – I think everyone in Brooklyn knew a gay person, actually – but it still wasn’t _allowed_. Growing up, we lived near a bar that they would frequent and we had to deal with the nightly raids from the police and the beatings from the public. The bar got trashed frequently, burnt to the ground once. I remember that because the smoke gave me an asthma attack so bad I had to go to the hospital and Buck nearly went mad with trying to pay the bill. But the beatings were the worst. One man on our block got dragged out of his house late one night and we never saw him again, all because he fell in love with the man across the street.”

Steve swallowed and began to turn the cards over in his hands, running his fingers along the edges of the paper as he got lost in the memories.

“All he did was fall in love and he lost his life. The wrong people found out about him and his partner and that was it. They never got to grow old together. Never got to do anything together. I grew up being told that it was wrong, that being gay was bad. I can’t tell you the number of times that I was told I was going to hell if I so _looked_ at another man. It was everywhere. For a society that condemned being gay, they sure talked about it a fucking lot. I was told it over and over again, told to hide away and pretend that I wasn’t broken.”

Steve sniffed and pressed his lips together, his back subconsciously straightening as his tone began to grow in strength. “But I couldn’t help it; I couldn’t help the way I felt. It was so hard to try and figure out what I felt, what I wanted to do, or who I wanted to be. I was told that I should hate the way other men made me feel, told that I would burn for eternity if I so much as imagined the feel of another man’s lips on mine. I couldn’t tell anyone what I was battling with for fear of being attacked. And it wasn’t even that I would just have been shunned; I may have been out-rightly killed. Even my best friend knowing would have put him in danger for his own life, if he’d have covered up my own sexuality. There were watchers, you know. There were actually people that went into known homosexual hotspots and pretended that they were gay just to catch people out and lead them off to be beaten or threatened. You have no idea what it was like. None of you will ever know, and I hope to God that you don’t have to experience that.”

There was a stunned silence: all chatter had died out and no questions were being shouted forward as the entire room hung on every word falling from Steve’s lips. Steve took a moment to try and breathe and he dropped his gaze down to his notecards to try and get back on track. It didn’t work too well as he was still struggling to read the words that he had thought the cards depicted.

“In the war things were slightly different,” he said, a little lighter, a little less wobbly. “There was a lot less worrying about men sharing a bed when they might die the next day and when they were all in a different country to their wives and girlfriends. It was almost seen as manly to want to hug your comrades, to get that tiny bit of comfort before you sacrificed everything and more. There was nothing remotely feminine or weak about a man that stared down enemy fire with his head held high, even if he went home to another man and got fucked up the ass.”

There was the smallest snort and Steve felt his lips twitch. Of course that was Tony; always the first to break the tension in a room. It did work, though, Steve had to give him that. There was a glimmer of hope shining before Steve and he reached for it.

“But things are different now. There are still people who won’t let others be happy, ones who try to dictate the lives of other people even though it has no bearing on their own lives, but they’re being drowned out. It’s slow and it’s tiny, but it’s there. I don’t want to live a lie anymore. I don’t want to hurt people around me by hiding who I am and projecting years of programming. I’ve spent so many years in the shadows, so many nights pushing people away and spitting on them when I should have been holding them close and letting myself feel.”

Once again, Steve caught Tony’s eyes. Reaching out for that endless comfort, Steve ignored the cameras and the reporters scribbling frantically as he spoke straight from the heart, saying the words he’d always wished he could.

“I don’t want to not be who I am anymore; who I _want_ to be and who I know I am inside. I want to love another man, I want to raise a family with him and be able to walk down the street without fearing for my life or his. I want to pave the way for the next generation, for kids to see and _know_ that this world is a safe place for them to be true to themselves. I’m still working out my own feelings and I don’t want people to have to go through what I did.”

He could feel his throat tightening again, but this time he didn’t feel like he was going to be sick. It was a weird feeling, almost a sort of excitement.

“I tried to force myself to live the life that was accepted by the society that I lived in, but it made me so low that I… I did something that I maybe shouldn’t have done, but something that felt right in the moment. But it did bring me here. It brought me to a world that I can help to change, to a time that needed someone to lead the way. Maybe I’m not the best person for the job and maybe I’ll only make more mistakes by trying.”

Steve broke off and clenched his fists, screwing up the politically-correct and coherent notes still clutched in his hands. He carefully unfurled his fingers as he breathed in and out, relaxing himself until he felt the tension ease out of his forearms, preparing himself for his grand finale.

This was it. This was the moment he’d dreamt of for as long as he could remember. He lifted his chin and looked around the room, pausing to make eye-contact with a lot of reporters so that they could see the truth he was projecting and the confidence he longed to show.

“Thank you all for being here today. My name is Steven Grant Rogers. I am Captain America, and I am gay.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Today was meant to have been national piercing day, but I ripped one of mine out today and it made me sad so I wrote a sad thing.


End file.
